December 16, 2013

"... the 'greed is good' ethos, whatever else may be wrong with it, is much sexier, more rebellious, and thus more appealing than staid bourgeois morality. But more to the point, it’s interesting that both [The Daily Caller's Matt] Lewis and [Andrew] Sullivan consider Smith the fons et origo of fiscal conservatism, as defined by support for capitalism. I find it interesting because it’s mistaken, albeit a mistaken belief that is held almost universally."

The article makes the point, and does a good job of it, that there is nothing new under the sun. Thales of Miletus is considered the first Greek philosopher. He used his knowledge of the weather to conclude that the coming growing season would be unusually good. He hired all the olive presses at a discount before anyone else realized the situation and the fortune he made from his monopoly allowed him to found the "Milesian School" in about 600 BC.

It's not a "greed is good" ethos. It's a "people looking out for their own self interest is good" ethos. Lefties don't read or understand Rand's work but still feel entitled to snark about it. Rand also supported, as her first principle, faith in the abilty of rational and creative man to overcome both nature and God, which one would think lefties would be all over.

The Jouornolist/Media Matters people are so tiresome. Don't they ever get tired of writing this crap?

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.[19]

Rand's moral argument for extremism as quoted by Mytheos Holt is as follows:

"When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil."

Holt somehow misses the "reduce their virtues to the approximate" qualifier which is just another way to say that the bad guys are the morally bereft moderates - not the extremists.

Ayn Rand is more dangerous than Adam Smith and Hayek because she gives a strong moral foundation to the right-wing world view. It's not enough to understand why free market economy is efficient, you need to know why it morally wrong to be against free market economy.

Look, Rand was a hit-and-miss fiction writer in bad need of an editor.

And, her philosophy doesn't entirely rise to the level of qualifying; it's unaware of its own dependencies. She was deeply ignorant of whole swaths of human life. And Whittaker Chambers had her number in the observation that, wow, how come no children ever came about from all the acrobatic cavorting between the heroine of Atlas Shrugged and her three suitors? Probably some of it was in vase indebito, but in spite of Rand's heaving bosom about that kind of thing, surely not all of it?

Having said that, Rand had a few things going for her:

1. She illustrated very clearly and accurately how leftism destroys the wealth it needs for continuance, and yet uses that as an excuse to continue eating itself and everyone else;

2. She explained very effectively how leftist redistributionism is mere unjustified violence;

3. She showed very neatly how a surplus of burdensome regulation is not actually intended to protect anyone from anything, but only to make it impossible for anyone to comply, so that, should they offend the powers-that-be, they can be selectively prosecuted on a whim;

4. She brilliantly illuminated the way that large businesses are often not the enemies but the cronies of government, participating in writing the legislation in order to destroy their own competition, to pull up the ladder behind themselves once they're big enough to buy Congressmen, to replace the aristocracy of customer service with "the aristocracy of pull";

5. She indicated just how easily the poor are deceived into voting for the very leftist charlatans whose policies guarantee their own starvation, and how those charlatans often know exactly what they're doing, but find it in their own interests to keep riding the tiger of leftism, for fear of what'll happen if they let go.

Now these are five things that needed doing. Rand did them. Kudos to her.

One need not cover over her deficiencies in other areas to champion what she got right.

These days, a perceptive man's biggest reason for not voting for Democrats is because he cares for his poor neighbors, and knows he wouldn't be able to look them in the face ever again, if he stabbed them in the back that way.

There was a time when that wasn't so obvious. Rand helped make it obvious. Kudos to her, I say.

Rand, Hayek, Smith, Mises. None of them are very good writers. Milton Friedman has persuaded more people of the virtues of the market economy than those four put together. Read Capitalism and Freedom if you want to see how a master does it.

My gateway drug to conservatism (and libertarianism, although it was only years later that I heard the word) was Conscience Of A Conservative, by Goldwater. Until I read that book in 1960 I thought I was a "liberal" because, having studied Latin, I thought "liberals" were those who supported freedom ("libertas"). Goldwater (or whoever his ghost-writer was) showed me that what I believed was properly called conservative.

I read Smith for credit and Rand for fun in college, but I was already hooked by then. I am convinced by experience and observation that the market economy is the greatest engine for the betterment of the greatest number of people that has ever been devised by human kind. That proof was offered by Smith (and if he cribbed from an earlier author, that's news to most of the world, including me), but I don't think anyone will ever mount the barricades to plant the banner of comparative advantage. That's where Rand and others like her come in, to make good policy a fighting faith.